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ple is the permissible uses for a certificate—for example, whether a certificate is<br />

allowed to sign another certificate or is usable in an SSLserver. If each application<br />

were to create its own disparate extensions, the information in those extensions<br />

either would be unusable by other applications or would significantly complicate the<br />

process of validating a certificate because it would need to recognize a virtually<br />

unlimited number of different extensions that all mean essentially the same thing.<br />

Of the standard extensions defined by X.509v3, there are only four that are well supported<br />

and in widespread use. Only one of them must be designated critical according<br />

to the standard, while the other three may or may not be. For now, we will not<br />

delve into the details of the X.509 format, but in Recipes 10.4 through 10.7 we will<br />

discuss what you need to know to properly validate a certificate.<br />

See Also<br />

• Planning for PKI: Best Practices Guide for Deploying Public Key Infrastructure by<br />

Russ Housley and Tim Polk (John Wiley & Sons)<br />

• Network Security with OpenSSL by John Viega, Matt Messier, and Pravir Chandra<br />

(O’Reilly & Associates)<br />

• RFC 3280: Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Certificate and Certificate<br />

Revocation List (CRL) Profile<br />

• RFC 2560: Online Certificate Status Protocol<br />

• Recipes 7.1, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 10.12<br />

10.2 Obtaining a Certificate<br />

<strong>Problem</strong><br />

You want an established PKI to issue a certificate to you.<br />

Solution<br />

Contact the CA that you wish to use. In this recipe, we focus on how to deal with<br />

VeriSign, which is the most popular CA. VeriSign sells several kinds of certificates<br />

from their web page (http://www.verisign.com).<br />

In Recipe 10.3, we enumerate other CAs that have their root certificates in the popular<br />

browsers and thus are worthwhile to consider as alternatives.<br />

Discussion<br />

Before obtaining a certificate, you first need to determine what purpose the certificate<br />

will serve. There are many different types of certificates offered by a variety of<br />

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition<br />

Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.<br />

Obtaining a Certificate | 513

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